Explore Our Water Conservation and Data Collection Services

The natural growth of the population inevitably leads to rapid urbanization, converting forest and farming lands into urban lands. Urban growth-driven land-use change significantly influences the surface heat balance and exchange of water vapor and momentum between the atmosphere and the surface layer.

For example - Urbanization increases the proportion of impervious land cover, and as urbanization and impervious surface increase, the volume and velocity of surface runoff increase. Infiltration and groundwater recharge decrease, and water tables drop, leading to increased flooding and soil erosion and water quality deterioration.

Best management practices, i.e., use of legumes in crop rotations, integrated farming operations of permanent crops, pasture and livestock, and nitrogen leaching preventing agrochemical applications as well as conservation tillage and soil biochar amendment, are considered.

We use the SWAT model to estimate water yield and quality for the watershed. After considering the possible climate change and more variable precipitation, the simulation is conducted based on the projected temperature and climate change precipitation. We use ArcGIS in SWAT to grid DEMs to delineate the watersheds, perform various functions, and use polygon/grid coverages of soils and land uses to delineate HRUs based on the major soil and land use type in each sub-watershed.

Agricultural management is incorporated with SWAT to reflect its impact on water yield and quality. The input data include temperature, precipitation, wind, relative humidity, solar radiation, soil, topography, hydrology, land cover, and land use management operations.